Nothing, Everything, Or Just You
by LtoADreamer
Summary: Everyone always assumed what Joseph Kavinsky wanted. Nothing. Everything. What he really wanted was the one thing he couldn't steal. Even after all he did to earn his favor, Ronan refused him still. It was his last straw, his last possible moment, & Kavinsky took a gamble. For Ronan. RonanL. X J.Kavinsky. B/B, Dream Thieves & Blue Lily Lily Blue spoilers. Rated for future chapters.
1. Prologue

**Prologue**

Everyone always assumed what Joseph Kavinsky wanted. Nothing. Everything. His life was a music video of sex and drugs and cars. He was a dream thief, he could take anything he wanted from that secret place.

Anything, except the one thing that dream place refused to let him forge.

Kavinsky had tried before. Once. Maybe a hundred times and the forest denied his every attempt. Only in the normal dreams, the human ones that he couldn't steal from, could he even _see_ his desire. But never could he obtain. And even in the dreams he was allowed, his desire was imperfect.

Ronan Lynch was impossible to make a forgery of. He was a warring star full of endless possibilities. He was brother to a liar and brother to an angel, son of a dream and son of a dreamer. He was molten blue eyes and a smile made for war. He was Celtic tattoos and ravens and five knotted leather bands that tasted like gasoline. He was a bomb.

Ronan Lynch was impossible and maybe that was why Joseph Kavinsky wanted him: because there could only ever be one Ronan Lynch, the dream thief.

Maybe it was his unflinching gaze, his second finest weapon after his silence. Maybe it was the way he was dangerous in his own way. Maybe it was because they were two of a kind and Kavinsky was tired of being alone. Or maybe it was the way that Ronan Lynch just didn't give a _damn_ about Joseph Kavinsky the way others, groupies really, pretended.

It should have been the two of them. Not Dick-Three, not the baby doll, and certainly not the Aglionby poster boy of poverty.

Kavinsky had known since the moment he saw Ronan wake up and the blood appeared. The moment Joseph Kavinsky recognized that Ronan was gay made him dream about it, even when he was awake. And it was a damn fucking confirmation the moments after he felt his own fingertips on Ronan's tongue. The impossibly red pill gave him one opportunity he would have been completely out of his mind to pass up.

It was the chance to touch Ronan. Not like the way he had to haul the Irish teen's dead weight through his house to the theater room where he woke. He didn't take advantage of that like he could have. He wanted to, _damn_ did he _want_ to, but he didn't.

Ronan Lynch, chest down on a perfect version of Dick's Camaro, the fair Celtic skin of his back on display. The inky black tattoo rippled over his muscles, fascinating the conscious thief while Ronan experienced a painless and very temporary death. He leaned over his desire and traced the pattern of the tattoo, light over his shoulder blades and then slowly down Ronan's spine, feeling the muscles tense up slightly but Kavinsky could feel the other restraining himself from moving. As though doing so would wound him.

Joseph Kavinsky never thought the word beautiful could be pinned to Lynch before, but in that moment it did.

It should have been them.

Instead, Ronan chose his gang of losers.

"It was never going to be you and me." That was Ronan's promise, followed with a smile like a knife.

Ronan Lynch brought it all on himself.

Ronan Lynch was Joseph Kavinsky's last straw.

* * *

><p>This year there were two ambulances and four cops parked half a mile from the drag strip. This year there were ten Mitsubishis to blow up. One of them contained Lynch's angel younger brother, Matthew. This year was going to be the last Fourth of July that Kavinsky ever threw. This was going to be the last day for Joseph Kavinsky.<p>

The last time he would ever see what — no. _Who _— he really wanted.

"You don't have to do this," was the last thing he let Ronan say in the dream world. Ronan didn't know just how much he really did need to do this.

When Ronan rejoined Kavinsky in the real world, he brought with him an albino version of his own personal torture. Three times larger than the black bastards that had tried to kill Ronan, leading the Celtic teen to wrecking Dick's beloved car.

And the two creatures fought, a destructive clash of dreams.

Kavinsky could feel Ronan's blue eyes on him before the dragon destroyed one of the Mitsubishis. Ronan tried to convince him to stop this. He tried to convince him to tell him which car his brother was in. Kavinsky told the truth. The white one. Not that the truth helped. All his Mitsubishi copies were white. He was smart though, Lynch was, and he checked the wrong door of the right vehicle though just as Kavinsky climbed on top.

The dream thief he wanted got what he wanted, his brother, and yelled at him to get off the car. To come down. Ronan knew Kavinsky was planning on dying now.

"Come down, you bastard!"

* * *

><p>It didn't hurt like he thought it would.<p>

Then again, though, this was his last impossibly red pill. The dragon was.

It was designed just for Kavinsky anyway. Designed to cut him and all his creations off from the dream place once and for all.

He did it for Ronan.


	2. 1 Ought To

**1. Ought To**

Ronan knew he ought to hate him.

There was nothing about Joseph Kavinsky that wasn't despicable. Yet every time he thought about that prick, his heart surged. Muscle memory.

Everything about him was absolutely unlike every common person in Henrietta that he knew, Blue and Adam too. The long nose; the hollowed-out, heavy-lidded eyes; the dark arch of his brows — he was clearly an import from elsewhere. A Bulgarian coke-addict adrenaline-junky from Jersey living in a suburban mansion with a cocaine-junky mother. Rumor had it that his father was rich and powerful and possibly lived in Jersey still, possibly as a mobster. Rumor had it, though, that Kavinsky had tried to kill him. Kavinsky didn't _try_ to do anything. He simply _did_. It didn't confirm or deny the rumor though. Joseph only confirmed his father _tried_ to kill him.

His smile was always easy and ugly and lascivious and erratic and vulgar. His eyes always glittered with mischief, always high to the point that even Ronan had never seen the color of his irises. They were only black and white in all his memories.

Ronan didn't know if what he felt the moment he watched the paramedics hurriedly load Joseph Kavinsky into an ambulance to try to save him was relief or an ugly sense of loss. Kavinsky deserved hell for kidnapping his brother, Matthew. Ronan knew he did, yet he still couldn't bring himself to hate that insufferable teen.

Honestly though, Ronan Lynch wondered what he wanted. He couldn't possibly want nothing; no one ever could while still having some form of existence. At the same time, it was obvious that Kavinsky didn't want everything; every single thing Ronan had seen him dream up, or suspected that was dreamed, fit Kavinsky's goals, be it for an adrenaline-rush or otherwise.

One thing was obvious though: Joseph Kavinsky had a deep and incurable _want_ for something. Whatever that something was, Ronan suspected that Kavinsky hadn't obtained it, especially by the time he thieved the dragon of destruction from Cabeswater that Kavinsky eventually used against his own self.

Ronan couldn't help admitting to himself every so often, a month after his death, two months, more than that, that he what he did hate about Kavinsky was that he _did_ die.

His father and Kavinsky were both dream thieves, and they were both dead. Neither of them were the Greywaren like Ronan was, but they were both dream thieves like he was. And they were both dead and gone and Ronan was alone.

Kavinsky had challenged Ronan like no other had tried to, pissing him off and reaching out to him at the same time. He was an insufferable bastard, an instigator, an irritator, a peer, a rival, and a teacher, all at once. It took Ronan months of sleeping somewhere between Monmouth Manufacturing, the floor beside Adam's flat IKEA mattress, and the Barns that Ronan realized and recognized that he never wanted Kavinsky to die. He just wanted to keep Matthew safe.

Ronan knew he could have saved Kavinsky too, but he didn't know if by leaving Matthew alone for a fraction of a second would make the dragon turn to his brother instead of the possibility of destroying the Mitsubishi Evo and Kavinsky in one fell swoop. He could have.

He could have.

But here he was, five months later, sitting in Latin class with a substitute teacher since Greenmantle's quick retreat, staring at his notebook while the idiot attempted his best shot at grammar. Honestly the students were teaching the teacher more about Latin than the other way around. It gave Ronan opportunities to think while Adam, Gansey, and other dedicated members of the class corrected the teacher time and time again.

No one but Adam and Gansey tried to bother Ronan in Latin class, and since the waking of Gwenllian and Artemis, even Gansey had his hands full and had taken to writing down every single question that popped into his head to later ask Blue's father. Adam was just trying to survive too, do well in school, work to afford his tuition, work to afford his apartment that Ronan had made a fuck lot easier to afford because he cared.

It was strange. Adam would throw a fit if anyone dared try to help him, he went off on Gansey when he thought that he had fixed his rent to afford the raise in Aglionby tuition. But the instant that it was Ronan giving him help, he wouldn't complain at all. It was like Adam knew that Ronan wasn't doing it out of pity. It never was out of pity.

Gansey and Adam and Ronan were a complicated mess. Gansey was privileged and it was easy to tell just by looking at him. Adam was not privileged and it was easy to tell just by looking at him. Ronan was a different ball game entirely.

His room inside Monmouth Manufacturing was filled with expensive toys, but, like a spoiled child, he ended up playing outside with sticks. He was privileged and didn't entirely look or act like it. Anyone with little or lots of money could have the same rough manners that Ronan did, anyone with little or lots of money could intimidate a piece of plywood into doing what he wanted. That was what made Ronan different. It was the fact that Ronan was so privileged and yet acted in the middle ground, looked the middle ground, _was_ the middle ground, that made it so much easier for Adam to accept any aid Ronan gave.

It was so different from when Gansey or Blue tried to. They were complete opposite ends of the spectrum and yet Ronan was there, smack in the middle, and it was acceptable.

That was Ronan's guess anyway.

Adam did the best he could and Ronan knew it. Adam _tried_ to do everything without a handout.

That was one reason Ronan liked Adam so much. He tried his damnedest to do his best, and sometime he fell short. What made Ronan want to reach out to him, which caused Ronan to want to reach out to him, was that Adam didn't know how to ask for help.

Adam Parish, army of one, didn't know how to ask for help.

Even the raven boy who was more raven than the others knew that everyone needed a little help, even he did.

Maybe that was why Ronan wanted to reach out to Kavinsky, _wished_ he had reached out to him before. Because like Adam, Kavinsky didn't ask for help. He tried to do everything on his own.

And fell short.

The difference between Adam and Kavinsky was that people tried to help Adam. No one tried to help Kavinsky.

Ronan rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand hard, frustrated.

He could have helped Kavinsky, but he didn't.

Because he had thought Kavinsky didn't matter.

He did. Just like Adam, he did.

Gansey nudged Ronan's foot with his own and the teen looked to him with his eyes dark. He hadn't slept well in a while, and he hadn't shaved that morning. His five o'clock shadow seemed almost grown on purpose to spite Gansey's inability to grow facial hair today.

He had been doing that a lot lately.

_Are you okay?_ Gansey's eyes asked Ronan, who made a distinctive sound in his throat that gave a vague impression somewhere between _I'm fine_ and _Fuck off_.

Typical Ronan, especially as of late.

It was all Ronan could do to look to the front of the classroom, begrudgingly, rather than back to his notebook. His eyes focused on the copied Latin phrase and his brain translated without hesitation.

**_Amor ex oculis oriens in pectus cadit._**

_Love is borne out of the eyes and sinks into the heart_.

He bit his lip and looked back down to his notebook, teeth gritting. A bunch of romantic bullshit! The raven boy glowered at his notebook for the remainder of the class, refusing to think about any one person, not Adam, not Kavinsky, not Gansey, not Noah, and certainly not Blue. He thought only about how much he wanted to destroy something.

The moment the class ended, Ronan tore down the hall before Gansey or Adam could follow him. He was skipping his last classes of the day, otherwise he knew, he _knew_, that someone would get hurt.

_Love is borne out of the eyes and sinks into the heart._

It played in his mind as he opened the driver's side door to the charcoal BMW hard enough that the car shook, then he threw himself in hard enough that the car kept shaking, and then he slammed the door hard enough that the car shook yet more. And then he left with enough speed to make the tires squeal.

The teachers weren't going to be happy but fuck them.

Ronan needed to let off some steam.

He drove away from the Aglionby property, past Nino's, past the gas stations and stores and little houses and out of Henrietta and _away from everything_.

It wasn't until he found himself among a field of white Mitsubishis that he stopped.

Kavinsky's old dreaming ground.

Ronan slammed his fist into the wheel and the horn blared in retaliation along with Ronan yelling. He wanted to destroy something but all he could do was rest his forehead against the steering wheel and murmur curses.

The raven boy cursed himself. He cursed Adam. He cursed Kavinsky. He cursed Gansey. He cursed Noah. He cursed Declan. He cursed himself.

When he finally felt his shoulders relax and his throat hoarse, he rested back in his seat and gazed out over the field of Mitsubishis.

"Joseph Kavinsky, you bastard," he mumbled and he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.


End file.
